I think when people give gifts they do expect something in return, at least the acknowledgment that it was THEY who gave the gift. More fame to them. What I don't like is if they start pointing out how people who don't follow their example are evil. The key word I've come to think in terms of is "self-serving".
John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
171–180 of 515 posts
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't Carmack just employing the 'Cathedral' type of 'Open Source'?
The “cathedral” model refers to closed-source development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_developme...
Appending ‘development’ seems like a significant departure from ‘vanilla’ “Open Source” to me, and wouldn’t all development be ‘closed-source’ at least between commits, if not between pull requests?
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#173Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a…
MIT and BSD licenses are kind of obvious. They are academic licenses, named after universities.
The idea is that you have people paid to create something of potential value, but the value of the outputs has only a limited and indirect impact on their compensation. If someone finds the outputs valuable, they should mention it in public, to let the creators use it to demonstrate the value of their work to funders and other interested parties.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
More people use Linux, more recognition Linux itself get which directly or indirectly gets some more donations, developers etc. With AI, the link is not clear at all. Its just pure consumption. There is no recognition.
> There is no recognition I've never written or contributed to open source code with this being the goal. I never even considered this is why people do it.
I worked on several open source projects both voluntarily or for work. The recognition doesn't really need to be financial. If people out there are using what you are building, contributing back, appreciating it -- it gives you motivation to continue working. Its human nature. One of the reason why there are so many abandoned projects out there.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> edit: I’m assuming licenses were respected Licenses were not respected. Most open source licenses require credit at least.
"BotXPTO has been trained with the entire internet circa 2026" is arguably attribution enough.
This would be useless. And false. It could not be argued in good faith. And open source licenses require the original copyright notice specifically.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#176All due respect to Carmack but I think his take is probably influenced by his investment in his own AI company. There doesn’t seem to be many on this space who have any ethical or moral problems with profiting from the work of others and not contributing anything back to the commons. If we all intended our work in OSS the way he did maybe we’d all see it his way too.
Copy left licenses are generally intended, afaict, to protect the commons and ensure people have access to the source. AI systems seem to hide that. And they contribute nothing back.
Maybe they need updating, IANAL. But I’d be hesitant to believe that everyone should be as excited as Carmack is.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#177This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! Bu…
> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with paid plugins or enterprise support. In these cases, open…
There's been something lost over time about the philosophy of open source. It appeared at a time when it was becoming apparent that computers represented a new type of technology where you couldn't just "look under the hood". An independent mechanic or machinist could repair a car to spec. A carpenter didn't need original blueprints of the house to create an addition. You could disassemble a typewriter or a sewing machine and with some ordinary skill actually manage to figure out how it worked. With compiled software the bar to understanding by the owner or operator was raised significantly. Open source was about being able to actually work on the thing you owned.
Edit: Note that the original term was Free Software, but there's a long history of politics about why the two are different.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#178Has anyone else noticed a cultural shift around monetization of output? I think there wasn't as much back when I first started using open-source programs, both as a user, and a small-time contributor for decades now. And I've noticed this on other things too. A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a…
> A short while ago, someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me.
Did you respond by asking them how Reddit makes money?
The anti-corporate mentality isn't new, but it does surface in different ways and communities over time. The Reddit hivemind leans very anti-corporate, albeit with a huge blind spot for corporations they actually like (Reddit itself, their chosen phone brand, the corporations that produce the shows they watch).
The Reddit style rebellion is largely symbolic, with a lot of shaming and snark, but it usually stops when it would require people to alter their own behavior. That's why you got dog-piled for doing something productive on a site where user-generated content is the money maker.
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no Carmack, but everything I've released as open source is a gift with no strings (unless it was to a project with a restrictive license). A gift with strings isn't exactly a gift. If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me, there were no strings. Your users presumably benefit from the software I wrote, unless you're using it for evil, but I don't have enough clout to use an only IBM may use it for evil l…
> If you take my gift and profit, it doesn't hurt me My opinion is that it actually hurts everyone when the open source commons are looted for private profits
Carmack is wealthy, and will do OK even if every single software-related job is terminated and human-mediated code-generation is relegated to hobby-status. Other people's milages vary.
My motivations are very different: the projects I authored and maintained were deliberately all GPL-licensed, my contributions to other OSS are motivated by the desire to help other people - not to an amorphous "world."
Re: John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
#180TL;DR: I really wanted to use a more permissive license so I don't mind AI scraping my code. Fine for him, but it's totally reasonable for people to want to use the GPL and not have it sneakily bypassed using AI.
Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities. The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software. Many of those are disappointed wit…
I don't think we should protect "source-code", we should protect people. Source-code doesn't care, people do.
Should we protect developers and their rights? Surely, and users' rights too definitely. But protecting source-code as such seems a bit abstract to me.